Another Photo Album

I just uploaded another set of pictures from the past. This time I found pictures from Christian's Easter Party at First Methodist Early Learning Center. What's really interesting is how well he sat *still* for snacks, lunch, and craft time.

I'm still not sure that Christy or I can get him to do that now. Enjoy!

PS. Christy is giving me some stuff to put on her wishlist. I'll post a blurb here when I've got that done.

PPS. I've made some progress on that book - finishing the battle of Marathon (Athenians defeat Persians) and now getting into the battle for Syracuse (Sicilians defeat [correction] Athenians).

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Licensing Changes - Followed Up

Wow. Not only did I receive a response from Mark of Sysinternals, I received a secondary clarification email. Although I will have to disagree with Mark on one point, I do have to admit I was wrong about the previous license.

Sometime, around February of this year, Sysinternals changed their license from a "free to use, anytime, anywhere" to a "free to use for personal use and personally owned machines only" - which is pretty restrictive. Although Mark stated that the Microsoft license is less restrictive, I'll have to respectfully disagree: the Microsoft license FAQ states clearly that you can only use the utilities on computers you personally own. (Still a no-use policy inside any organization. Mark stated that this was permissible, but as the Microsoft license stands, I don't think it is.)

I guess I can only recommend use of those utilities - but not actually use them on someone else's machine. Phooey.

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Licensing Changes

Some background...

A few months ago, Microsoft purchased the company Sysinternals. A company responsible for some great programs - most of them useful for troubleshooting Windows problems, such as Process Explorer, File Monitor, Registry Monitor among others.

The other day (in the Quixotic quest) I needed to get another copy of File Monitor, so I headed over to http://www.sysinternals.com and watched as it re-directed to a Microsoft site. Well, now that's a change. I started wondering what other changes might have been made, and then I stumble on this Licensing FAQ page. Now that's really new. Just for fun I pulled an older version of File Monitor off of my home server and I checked it's licensing:

This software is provided "as is", without any guarantee made as to its suitability or fitness for any particular use. It may contain bugs, so use of this tool is at your own risk. We take no responsilbity for any damage that may unintentionally be caused through its use.

You may not distribute Filemon in any form without express written permission of Mark Russinovich or Bryce Cogswell.

If you are interested in redistributing Filemon, either in original or modified form, or wish to use Filemon source code in a product, please send e-mail to licensing@sysinternals.com with details.

Simple. Clean. Nice for anyone who needs to use their software to fix problems.

Now back to the biggie I noticed on that Microsoft page:

Q: May I freely load or use Sysinternals utilities on computers that I support but do not own?

A: No. You will need to contact Microsoft Sysinternals Licensing (syslic@microsoft.com) and inquire about fee based licensing options.

What? This is a joke, right? Some of the best utilities ever written for troubleshooting problems on WINDOWS computers and Microsoft has now restricted their use. This isn't a small change, this is a HUGE change. Why even keep it free for download?

Update: I've written an email to both Mark and Bruce of Sysinternals using the email addresses found in that old license. I doubt I'll get a response, but it would be interesting to know if they know about this change.

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Last Friday Night

So what happened last Friday night? That Quixotic quest that I started with Google Desktop Search? I actually finished it! For whatever reason, I really got perturbed that I couldn't get GDS to run successfully. It didn't help that GDS was sort of teasing me - in that it would run for ten minutes or so before it finally failed. I stayed a bit late at work - uninstalling a piece of software, the installing/re-installing GDS, checking to see if GDS would run, uninstalling the next piece of software, repeat. After I had un-installed eight or nine programs (yes, eight or nine un-installs/re-installs of GDS), GDS finally started running for a bit. Then it failed. Oh great.

That started the next set of troubleshooting procedures - stopping running programs, processes, and services and then checking to see if GDS would run. An hour or so later, I had exhausted everything that I could stop, and GDS still didn't run. Bleh. However, that at least meant, that the conflict had to do with something attaching to explorer.exe and conflicting with GDS. I used Sysinternal's File Monitor to watch the file I/Os (reads, writes, queries) and saw that GDS was accessing one file quite often and failing on that access. I checked the settings set with that file (something to do with Stardock's IconPackager) and made a change. [In the file, the setting went from "Status=2" to "Status=1".] Restarted GDS, and voilà, GDS works. Unbelievable. A single little one character change and it made that much difference.

Completion of that quixotic quest was quite satisfying at the time. Maybe not so much in retrospect (in terms of time wasted...)

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Working On Albums...

If you check around a bit today, you should see the number of albums and number of pictures increase as I'm working on nothing but photos today. Check them out here.

More later!

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PS3 Nuttiness Continued...

That curiosity thing continued... I checked out some more of those PS3 eBay auctions. Guess what I found! This auction - the nuttiness (or scammage) continues. It looks like our friend "n.o.bound" found someone else to overpay, but not only that - check out that Seller's feedback. They're brand new to eBay and used a ton of "Buy It Now" auctions (at $1.00 or less) to pop up that feedback rating in a hurry. I wonder if this is a scammer scamming another scammer... Consider the first shoe dropped.

November 17th and the days to follow shall be quite interesting...

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Not Enough Caffeine Yet...

You know you haven't had enough caffeine intake when....

You're working on a spreadsheet: When entering data into a cell, you then need to append to that data and hit "F2" to edit it. When the cell data disappears, you attempt to do the same thing three or four times before you finally realize that the somehow the keyboard function lock has been cut off and instead of editing, "F2" is doing exactly what it's supposed to - that is "Undo"...

Bleh. I guess four cups of coffee don't suffice for me.

That's probably just a side effect of not getting enough sleep. Christian has been fighting something since last Saturday. He went to the doctor on Monday, but still seems to have a fever each day. The side effect of his sickness is that he's not sleeping through the night - which means that Mommy and Daddy don't sleep through the night. Let's see, last night I finally got to bed around midnight, but was up at 1:30, 3:00, and sometime around 6:00, Christy went and got Christian and placed him in our bed. All the waking led me to finally drift into a deep sleep around 7:00AM - just in time for Christian's normal wake up time of 7:30. (His internal "wake up" clock is deadly precise!) I could barely move and somehow dragged myself into the bathroom around 8:45AM. Late to work again! I hate that.

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